from The Golden Book
A Warning
No bark scroll of rhetoric
but skin-writ in
darkness in
personal conference.
Your eyebrow licked
smooth by a tongue
to a pointed tip. Lips
come pressed
to your downy temple,
heave
in aftermath.
A slurry of symbols writ
across thigh.
Wrestled by
the man
trying to capture
his own
ideas.
Wrestling, he touched
your hip and you were
dislocated,
limping
toward new
sensation.
Clear thinking required
not the clarity of
mezcal in
finest cut crystal,
not a mastery
of rules and a
memory full of
difficulties, but precision.
To stop to think
about form in mid-career,
the form of this
encounter.
Isn’t every
encounter a cross
to bear,
a cultural one?
The small battles.
The volleys.
The flag raisings.
The arrow stuck hard
in the doorpost or yard.
Your foreign skin
and
foreign touch.
How differently
the customs come.
Do I swaddle
in your striped bathrobe?
Do I lift your cap?
The man who writes
with one eye on rhetoric
is the man who can’t tell
whether to take off his hat
or to use fork or spoon
without consultation.
These things must be
instinctual and
un-selfconscious,
before they prove of value.
Know Where You Are Going
Lay him
like the carefully
surveyed road.
Out before you.
In before you.
When what is out comes in,
the story out the mouth and into the ear.
The squash from out the blossom
into the broth.
A hand from its deerskin mitten
to sleet and northern cold.
Know where you are going.
Lay him carefully
out like a map, in like a lion.
Know which He you are writing of:
He, the pianist carpenter, or
He, the poet violinist.
In like lions, out like lambs.
Set Up Sign-Posts
From the start,
we look for signs, symbols
of the place we are headed.
Bent trees we call trail.
Guide ourselves through
their bowlegs/bent shafts.
Set sign-posts.
A potted geranium
at forever bedside to guide
me to him.
Crushed leaves that
smell
of tobacco scented
fingertips.
His hand so often over
my mouth before the
open summer window above
the door of an all night diner.
We glance at the road we have come
to remind ourselves of position/direction.
Set sign-posts
The tuning peg he left
from the violin with the wolf note,
and the wooden box of rosin,
now lodged in a notch
between the logs
of a wooden frame,
stays hidden above the door.
In superstition convinced,
they will lead him
back to our storied sentence,
both subject and predicate.
Point to your beloved.
Remind him of his progress.
At the end tell him that
you have arrived—and see
that he understands it.
Don’t have him turning over the sheet and
saying with a start: “Oh, that's all there was to it.”
Why Wake to Light the Moon?
on the loss of my dog’s eye
It arrives six weeks after ordering online,
from Asia. I wake at 1:30 am to turn on the moon.
I think of your lone eye, how they asked of its twin,
Enucleate or eviscerate?
But what is a galaxy
scraped clean of stars?
Now I turn on the moon with a
tap of its USB ring,
watch your sole eye, turn to
stare at dark lunar maria. A red spot
on your Martian cornea swirls
against a milky way.
Zonules that once held a
satellite lens in place . . . dissolve
and echolocation, leads you back
to me.
